An Address book comprising names and contact information of parties to be contacted may be a primary starting point for mobile calls. Examples for contact information are identifiers such a phone numbers or email-addresses of the party in the address book typically associated to the name of the party in the address book but also information like street, zip-code, town, state, country etc. Existing address book solutions are mainly aimed at IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) operators and usable only with smart phones and require considerable CAPital Expenditure (CAPEX). An example for such an address book is the Ericsson Active Address Book product (AAB), see e.g. online Ericsson Product Catalogue, which is a high-end implementation for mobile phone address book synchronization features. Today the address book market for circuit-switched phones is mainly determined by back-up and restore functionality.
When intending to make a phone call to a called party, the calling party can look up the called party's entry in the address book in the phone and then dials the number. The number may be automatically dialled by the phone when e.g. clicking an appropriate button activating a dialling function on the phone for setting up a call to a called party.
If there is no entry in the phone, then the user as calling party needs to determine the number of the called party, e.g. from a phone book or from an operator or just from his/her memories, and enters this number into the phone to set-up a call to the called party. In many phones, the dialled phone number is added to the outgoing call list in the phone.
When making calls also to other called parties, further phone numbers will be added to the list.
Later, wanting to make a phone call to any of the previously called parties, the calling party again does not find an entry in his/her address book because the called party may not have typed in the called party into his/her address book. Further, the calling party may not be able to recognize the phone number of the called party from the outgoing call list, e.g. because the list is very long and/or just because the list contains very similar phone numbers which might confuse the calling party which may lead to calls to wrong called parties. Or, the calling party has once again turn to the operator or paper phone book as described above. All in all, existing approaches are quite complex and not very user-friendly and can be even costly if the calling party has to turn to the operator to request once more the phone number of a previously called party.